British singer, actress and model Jane Birkin in 1971. Photo / Getty Images
A new book, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, by Marisa Meltzer, explores the life of the actress who became synonymous with a status symbol.
In one of the most memorable scenes of Sex and the City, Samantha walks into a Hermès store to order her dream designer purse.
“It’s $4,000,” the sales associate tells her.
“I know,” she says.
“And there’s a waiting list,” he says.
“I assumed,” she replies.
“Five years,” he adds.
“For a bag?” she says, shocked.
“It’s not a bag,” he explains. “It’s a Birkin.”
That was 24 years ago. Today, prices start around US$12,000 ($21,000), and some bags sell for more, making the Birkin one of fashion’s most coveted and extravagant status symbols. Customers can’t just walk into Hermès and buy the purse; they go through an elaborate process of purchasing other products and then, after months or years, might be offered one of what the brand calls its “quota bags”. Demand is so great that the bags are instantly worth more on the resale market; there are hundreds of knockoffs, including last year’s US$78 “Wirkin” dupe sold by Walmart.
There are collectors with hundreds, including rare and custom pieces. But nothing is more collectible than the very first bag, created in 1984 for actor Jane Birkin. The black leather satchel – beat up, stained, scratched – sold for US$10.1 million in July, making it the most expensive handbag and second-most-expensive fashion item sold at auction (bested only by the US$32m ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz). The buyer was Japanese businessman Shinsuke Sakimoto, head of a luxury resale company.
In a new book, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, Marisa Meltzer explores the woman who inspired it all. Meltzer, a devout Francophile, was curious about the English girl who found love and stardom in France. Meltzer writes that she once dismissed Birkin as a glorified accessory to the famous men in her life. The irony, of course, is that now she’s best known as the name behind the most coveted accessory in fashion.
Birkin was a long-limbed, wide-eyed beauty born into an upper-class British family in 1946. Her father was a wealthy businessman, her mother an actress. As a teenager she loved fashion and fun, and came of age during London’s swinging ’60s without, it appears, much adult supervision. A few small theatre and film roles led to a naked romp in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and fame as a free-spirited nymphet.
She fell in love with 30-year-old John Barry, the composer for multiple James Bond movies, and married him as soon as she turned 18. Two years later, she was the mother of a baby girl and headed for divorce. By then, Birkin had moved to Paris to pursue acting and begun a notorious romance with Serge Gainsbourg, France’s celebrated and controversial singer-songwriter.
The twice-divorced Gainsbourg – a cross between Bob Dylan and Woody Allen – was magnetic, passionate, controlling and 18 years older than Birkin. He had a penchant for very young women and loved to push boundaries, even the liberal sexual mores of Europe. Their affair lasted 12 years and made Birkin one of the most photographed and famous women in France.
She was his lover, his muse, his Lolita. Together they were a sensation, rubbing shoulders with famous friends in restaurants and nightclubs. She was cast as the sexy ingenue in popular French films; he wrote, acted, grabbed headlines and pushed boundaries with songs like Je t’aime … moi non plus, a duet with Birkin that sounded like two people making love. It was a smash hit, so popular that the Vatican denounced it, which made it even more popular.
There was one more famous lover, French director Jacques Doillon – yet another problematic romance with a difficult man. It was complicated: Birkin now had three daughters: one with Barry, one with Gainsbourg and one with Doillon.
Like many actors, Birkin was romantic, insecure, malleable. There is no shame in poor choices – we’ve all made them – but Birkin jumped from bad guy to worse guy and then another bad guy with a lot of drama and not much reflection. Some of that can be written off to the limited career opportunities and expectations for women 65 years ago, but there is also the lingering sense that she took the path of least resistance most of the time.
“She sought out a very particular type of love; one that was dizzying with a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows,” Meltzer writes. “When describing her definition of romance, the word I keep coming back to is ‘adolescent.’ She got her first taste of fame around the time she got her first taste of dating. She spent the rest of her life chasing that same cocktail of feelings.”
Meltzer captures the sense of carelessness – intentional and benign – that marked Birkin’s life. The actress’ parents were oddly unconcerned about their teenage daughter’s relationship with a creepy older neighbour; her formal education ended at age 16; they allowed her, at 18, to marry a divorced man 13 years her senior. Birkin, in turn, bounced through adulthood and parenthood without much of a plan, protected by fame and enough money to wing it. She balanced her acting career – usually playing some version of herself – and her singing (her voice was iffy at best) with a turbulent private life. She hoped to be taken seriously as an artist; instead, she remained frozen in time.
In her epilogue, Meltzer explores the question of whether the men in Birkin’s life sexually exploited a vulnerable young woman. It’s tricky to judge any era by present standards – Birkin never claimed she was abused and defended Gainsbourg from accusations that he was a harasser and misogynist. But, M
eltzer writes, Birkin repeatedly overlooked inconvenient truths to maintain her relationships with these partners. “You can’t judge things by other epoques, you can’t measure them by this extraordinary state that Me Too has made,” Birkin said in a 2020 interview with the Times of London.
But Meltzer’s extensive reporting only goes so far; her portrayal is based on Birkin’s published diaries, media coverage and public performances. In her author’s note, Meltzer, whose previous book chronicled the rise of Glossier cosmetics, writes that she never met Birkin before her death. Her two surviving daughters, extended family and close friends all declined to be interviewed.
The result is a biography, available October 7, that is both intimate and removed. We read about Birkin’s inner insecurity and neediness and see the public face of this lovely woman. But her charm and irresistibility, often mentioned, are more elusive; there’s no sense of Birkin from the people who loved and knew her best. What emerges is a portrait of someone who drifted from man to man, role to role and became an icon almost by accident.
Which brings us back to the bag. By the early ’80s, Birkin had outgrown her girlish charms and, although still famous, was struggling to find her footing as an older actress. But for a chance encounter, her name probably would have faded alongside so many other celebrities of that era.
On a plane ride from Paris to London (the exact dates of this origin story are unclear), she was upgraded to first class and found herself seated next to Jean-Louis Dumas, chief executive of Hermès. Birkin famously carried a woven basket instead of a purse, and the overflowing contents spilled out around her. Dumas said he could come up with something better.
Birkin was familiar with Hermès and its luxury leather goods. The Kelly bag, named after American movie star Grace Kelly, was a ladylike purse too small for all the detritus Birkin carried around. Gainsbourg had used a Haut à Courroies, a huge satchel originally designed to carry riding boots. Birkin wanted something in between; she drew a version of her idea on an airsickness bag.
Dumas took the drawing and called Birkin a month later to refine the design. In 1984, the bag was finished: black leather, brass hardware, long shoulder strap, plenty of room and “JB” embossed on the front. Dumas liked the bag so much that he added it to the permanent collection and asked Birkin for permission to name it after her. She happily agreed. Had she been a more disciplined businesswoman, or had better advice, she might have stumbled into a windfall. Instead, she received a few free bags and about US$40,000 a year, Meltzer writes, and she persuaded Hermès to donate to her favourite charities.
Birkin loved the bag and was photographed carrying it everywhere. It weighed a ton because she stuffed it full. In a 1988 documentary, director Agnès Varda asked Birkin to show the contents: she dumped everything out, a jumble of paper, notes, pens, makeup and miscellaneous objects.
As her career waned, the handbag became more and more famous. It popped up in paparazzi celebrity photos and shows like Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls, Gossip Girl and Will & Grace. The irony of being asked, “Birkin? Like the bag?” was not lost on the woman who was once a household name in her adopted country. While touring for one of her concerts, Birkin admitted that, yes, she was the namesake: “And the bag is going to sing now.”
The very first Birkin was donated to an Aids charity auction in 1994 and resurfaced six years later, when it was purchased by Paris-based collector Catherine Benier, who has never revealed what she paid. Benier owned it for 25 years until the bag sold for the record-breaking price in July.